Better than nothing

I’ve been working on cataloging 13 years worth of my newspaper blackout work. It’s a very high-tech system: I sit in front of the computer with my big numbered binders and transcribe each poem into a big text file.

For me, there is a spiritual crush that happens when going through this much old work. You realize, that just like everything else, 90% of your work is mediocre at best. Most of it is crap. (Mary Karr once said reading old work is like a dog sniffing old turds.)

Still, there’s that 10%. (Is the binder 90% empty, or 10% full?) If 9 out of 10 poems are mediocre, there’s that 1 left that’s pretty good. And you couldn’t have gotten that 1 poem without those 9 bad ones. One poem that’s pretty good is better than no poem at all.